


Grunkle Stan's Meal Plan

by Nary



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Bad Cooking, Family, Family Dinners, Food, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-13
Updated: 2013-12-13
Packaged: 2018-01-04 12:13:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1080880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nary/pseuds/Nary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grunkle Stan isn't used to cooking for anyone other than Grunkle Stan. Having Dipper and Mabel stay with him forces him to make some changes to his usual routine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grunkle Stan's Meal Plan

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wonderminterplus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wonderminterplus/gifts).



Grunkle Stan wasn't used to cooking for anyone other than Grunkle Stan. And Grunkle Stan's personal standards for food weren't high. Was it cheap? Did it fill you up? Could it be made with a minimum of effort? Great, perfect, finito. Grunkle Stan ate a lot of cereal, and canned baked beans, and macaroni and orange-powder-that-wasn't-quite-cheese. Besides, Stan's kitchen hadn't been changed since the Mystery Shack was built, and he didn't have a lot of fancy gadgets like 'spatulas' or 'toaster ovens' or 'a working refrigerator'. He was used to making do with what he had. 

Having Dipper and Mabel stay with him forced him to think a little more carefully about meals, however. He was under the impression that growing kids needed vitamins and nutrients, and should probably eat vegetables and things like that so they didn't get scurvy or rickets or stop growing when they were only five feet tall, which would be a shame. So he stepped up his grocery shopping, splurging on things like a giant bag of split peas for soup, and produce from the 'almost but not quite rotten' discount shelf.

After seeing the idea on some cooking show he stumbled onto randomly and couldn't find the remote to switch away from, he also set up a weekly meal plan for dinners. It made it easier for him to do the shopping, and to remember that the kids needed to eat something other than chips and candy. Plus he didn't have to keep thinking of new ideas. The problem was...well, from Dipper and Mabel's perspective there were several problems. One, always having the same few meals on the same nights each week got boring pretty quickly. And two, Grunkle Stan just wasn't a very good cook.

**Monday: Meatloaf Night**

"I'm not a gourmet chef," Dipper muttered to his twin sister, "but shouldn't a meatloaf have... I don't know, meat in it?"

Mabel took a tentative bite, stuck out her tongue and fumbled for her glass of water. "Thith ith mothtly thand, I think."

"It's breadcrumbs," Grunkle Stan told them. "Makes the meat go further." 

Having gulped down some water, Mabel eyed her plate suspiciously. "I think it needs to go further. A lot further. Away."

"The baked potatoes are pretty good, though, right?" Stan asked, poking through the skin of his with a bent-tined fork. At least it was cooked - it let out a promising cloud of steam when it was opened.

"Is there any butter?" Dipper asked, not overly optimistically.

"There's 'I can hardly believe it vaguely resembles butter'," Grunkle Stan offered, nodding in the direction of the icebox.

"...I'll pass," said Dipper, resigned to a dry, bland potato.

That night, they gorged on leftover Summerween candy. At this rate, they would have to ration it out carefully to last the rest of the summer.

**Tuesday: Casserole Night**

"What even is this?" Dipper asked, poking at the unidentifiable reddish mass with his fork. It quivered unnervingly.

"Quinoa," said Grunkle Stan. He pronounced it quin-OH-wah. "It was on sale. And they say it's supposed to be really healthy. So I boiled it up and then I added some pizza sauce and cheese. You kids like pizza, right?"

"Ye-eessss," Mabel said. "Pizza is amazing. This is..."

"Also amazing," Dipper finished her sentence for her. "Just in a different way."

"Can't we order _real_ pizza?" Mabel asked hopefully. 

"What do you think I'm made of, free pizza?" grumbled Stan. "Just close your eyes and pretend that's what you're eating. It's good practice for getting used to inevitable disappointment in life."

After their attempts to wheedle and daydream their way into real pizza met with failure, Mabel and Dipper retreated to the gift shop, where Wendy was just shutting things down for the night. "Hey," she said, giving them a smile that made Dipper's heart race. "What's wrong? You guys look like someone peed in your cornflakes."

"That might have been better than dinner," Mabel said with a grimace, and went on to describe the casserole monstrosity to Wendy, in all its hideous glory.

"Oh man," Wendy said sympathetically. "That sucks. Hey, Stan gave me the key to the vending machine so I could dust the chips tonight - why don't you take something out of there? I know it's not much, but it'll help tide you over."

Dipper and Mabel helped themselves to some less-dusty-than-usual chips and a couple of cans of Pitt, and took them up on the roof to eat so Grunkle Stan wouldn't notice. It was the most satisfying dinner they'd had in ages.

**Wednesday: Breakfast For Dinner**

"What could go wrong with scrambled eggs?" was a question from a more innocent age, an era before the twins had learned precisely what horrors could be inflicted upon the humble yolk. The only question was, would they be soggy enough to run all over the plate, or dry and gritty like gravel, or an unnatural mixture of both? 

Fortunately, tonight, all of the eggs had somehow mysteriously gone missing. "Must have been an Egg-Nabbler," Mabel said innocently. "They're about as big as a hamster, only bald, and they sneak into the fridge at night and steal all the eggs for their, um, sinister egg-nabbling rituals."

"Yeah... that must have been it," Dipper agreed. Waddles had loved the raw eggs, actually, and was currently sniffing around to see if there were any more. "Oh well," Dipper said, nudging the pig aside. "I guess we'll just have to go out to the diner tonight." He and Mabel made big hopeful eyes at Grunkle Stan, who snorted dismissively.

"Nah, we've still got bread and marmalade, we'll make toast - maybe with some bacon," he added with a glower at Waddles, who scampered off quickly to hide behind Mabel. 

"Are we literally having bread and water for dinner?" Dipper asked, incredulous.

"Toast. Not bread. Toast," Stan told him. "Totally different."

Dipper tried to discreetly scrape some of the blackened crust off his toast. "You don't wanna do that," Grunkle Stan said, gesturing with his not-actually-butter knife. "The burned stuff puts hair on your chest."

"You do need all the help you can get in that department, Dipper," Mabel said with a grin, poking him in the side with her grappling hook. Then she shot it towards the ceiling beam, grabbing a box of Flaky-O's on the way, and swung out of the room to freedom. Dipper watched her enviously, nibbling on his burnt toast.

**Thursday: Spaghetti Night**

"Spaghetti shouldn't still be crunchy," Dipper pointed out. 

"Everyone's a food critic!" snapped Grunkle Stan. "It's al dente, that's all."

Mabel tried to cut hers up, but several of the pieces snapped audibly under her knife, and one shard flew across the room and narrowly missed hitting Soos, who had just walked in. "Hey dudes. My abuelita made too many tamales, so she asked me to get rid of some, and I already gave a bunch to the goat. Do you want...?"

He didn't have a chance to finish his sentence before Dipper and Mabel had rushed across the room and glomped onto him with every available limb. "Yes please thank you you're the best," they enthused, talking over one another in a torrent of appreciation, even as they unwrapped the tamales and began cramming them into their mouths.

Grunkle Stan sighed heavily and scraped the rest of their spaghetti onto his own plate and then, after a further moment's consideration, dumped the entire thing into Waddles' bowl. At least it wouldn't go to waste - _someone_ would appreciate it. 

**Friday: Mystery Night!**

"Dipper," Mabel said as they approached the kitchen cautiously, "I'm scared."

Grunkle Stan had been bustling around in there for a worryingly long time, and once they'd heard him singing to himself, accompanied by some sounds of heavy chopping. The meal plan just said 'Mystery Night'. 

The twins crept into the kitchen clinging to each other, as if expecting something horrible to jump out at them at any moment. It was more frightening than the Gobblewonker or the Hide Behind, and nearly as bad as the wax dummies or the Summerween Trickster. 

Of course, all that they found in the kitchen was Grunkle Stan, wearing an apron - which was a little scary, but not as bad as they'd expected. He was just taking a roast out of the oven. "Surprise!" he said cheerfully. 

It didn't smell too bad, and it wasn't burned to a crisp, so Mabel and Dipper were already pretty surprised. As they sat down at the table, Grunkle Stan started to carve the meat. Dipper's eyes narrowed as he tried to identify what it was. Not chicken, for sure. Not roast beef. Not ham. Maybe about the size of a lamb, but there was something about the shape that seemed... wrong.

"Where'd the possum go?" Mabel asked, looking around the kitchen. The twins were pretty sure Old Man McGucket had dropped the deceased animal off on the Mystery Shack's porch in lieu of paying the admission fee. Since then it had been sitting on the counter, or 'aging', as Grunkle Stan preferred to say, for several weeks.

Grunkle Stan looked up suddenly, as if caught. "Uh... " he said guiltily. "A nice farm in the country?"

"NO." Dipper and Mabel spoke in unison. "No roast possum," Dipper repeated. "Absolutely not." 

Mabel swiveled in her chair, looking around more excitedly. "What did you do with the fur?" she asked, trying to sound casual.

"And no possum-fur sweaters," Dipper added firmly, because he knew his sister.

"I won't make possum-fur sweaters for everyone if we get to go out to the diner tonight," Mabel suggested sweetly. "Otherwise, I hope you like grey."

"Fine! We can go to the diner. Sheesh," Stan exclaimed, throwing his hands up in frustration. "Your parents didn't tell me you two were such picky eaters."

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to all my betas, especially my favorite 8-year-old beta reader!
> 
> You can find me on Tumblr at [naryrising](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/naryrising) if you want to ask questions, make requests, or chat!


End file.
